I thought about a more user friendly version of list view editing. My idea is a first page definig fields for list view and table header descriptons. After saving the information a HTML table is build and be edited more in detail.
Please comment also in the tracker. Are there any developer that can add the feature?
After saving the information a HTML table is build and be edited more in detail.
If the idea is to use this form just for generating the html of the table and then work with the html then a simpler approach would be emulating the reset template function and generating a default aligned list template by a click of a button. A possible implementation is to add a virtual aligned list template to which the list template could be reset. This would first disable the editor (if enabled), set the list header to open table and a header row with the names of all the fields, the repeated entry to a row with a column for each field + a column for commands, and the list footer to close table. Users could then edit the html to remove or modify columns. See image for illustration.
If there is interest I can implement and patch it.
Hi Itamar,
may be a quick, but not a final solution. HTML table editing isn't a task normal teacher should do.
If you implement it, please add a warning message before any entry a user made is deleted while clicking on one of the buttons.
The current behavior of the template buttons is that they display the changes but do not save them yet. Saving requires clicking the save botton. So if the user has second thoughts he/she can refresh the page to return to the last saved template. When a template is saved there appears at the top the message 'Template saved'. I'm not sure that other indications are necessary.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'not a final solution'. If you want to allow the user to work WYSIWYG and yet maintain an aligned table, the current solustion is definitely not final. Allowing WYSIWYG is not impossible but may be a bit tricky and messy. The html manipulations may be editor dependent. I wouldn't go for extra interface (sort of editor-light for aligned tables) though.
Hi Itamar,
I'm all for the solution with the button. Building aligned lists for dbs is something that has taken a terrible amount of time every time it had to be done (no matter how versed one is in HTML), and there's no way around it if you want a decent looking database. At the same time, I don't think it would be worthwile (possible?) to "teach" a single editor instance on the template page to accept incomplete HTML-tags.
I find the button solution an elegant way to tackle this, and as long as the button behaviour is "parallell" to the "reset template" button, I don't think we'd need additional warnings.
A lot of interest from my side
Patch for 1.9 stable should be attached. See MDL-26138 for details.